An Exploration of Leeuwarden

Archaeologist Tamás Péterváry works for the Laczko Dezso Museum for heritage in Veszprem and visited curator Arda van Tiggelen from the contemporary art initiative Stichting VHDG in Leeuwarden. Together, they are participating in our Tandem Cultural Capitals programme, which they have been documenting thoroughly throughout their stories.

I have spent four days in Leeuwarden in the company of my Tandem partner Arda Van Tiggelen. I participate in the Tandem programme as a representative of the Laczkó Dezső Museum (LDM) in Veszprém, which will be the European Capital of Culture in 2023. LDM is about to venture on a journey of developing collaboration with local communities and specialists in other fields of interest in order to explore the cultural landscape in the Veszprém Region. As such an undertaking runs the risk of becoming a self-centered exercise, including the insight of a contemporary art initiative in another European region is a welcome process indeed.

Our Tandem collaboration with Arda from VHDG in Leeuwarden combines academic and artistic insights that converge on the ideas of landscape, public participation and visual presentation.

My stay in Leeuwarden started with the opening of an exhibition at VHDG. I was surprised how easy it was to connect with VHDG’s way of presenting contemporary art. Bram Kuypers, the artist in residence, worked with some fundamental elements of the Frisian landscape; he used mud, slates and a weathercock in reference to stories and phenomena of the local rural environment.
The opening also gave me an opportunity to discuss the involvement of minors in landscape research through recording their own story and collecting their own artistic representation about their environment. Narrative, may it be legendary or historic, is also a tool for approaching past human interaction with the landscape.

Arda and I visitied the Frisian Museum to take a critical glance at their various exhibitions. Again, it was the spatial dimension of the arrangements, i.e. the use of space to create a good environment for the perceptual interaction with the artefacts, that served as a common ground of interest. Another interesting topic during the visit was the underlying ideology though which artefacts were presented to the public.

Luckily at the time of my visit in Leeuwarden there was a small exhibition of archaeological artefacts collected by volunteers. I had the privilege to personally meet archaeologist Jan-Willem Oudhof, who coordinates the work of the volunteers. It was fascinating to explore the common challenges in two such distant regions.

As a final stage of my visit, Arda and I visited an event called Popup Archaeology at the Allar Pierson Museum in Amsterdam. We received a warm welcome by Marie France van Oorsouw, the local coordinator of the event. It was amazing to see how archaeological finds were processed through practical help from the public. While we have also been experimenting with community-based cleaning of pottery sherds, such processing of macro botanical finds was a surprising novelty for me.